Conor Grennan: What’s interesting to others

Conor Grennan is the author of Little Princes, a bestselling account of his time working at an orphanage in Nepal, and the founder of the non-profit organization Next Generation Nepal, which reunites trafficked children and their families. He will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

The problem that arises when writing a memoir – even when it’s covering only a three year span of your life – is that it can be difficult to know what stories will be interesting to others.

Some, of course, are easy. One of the main storylines in Little Princes is the search for seven children, young children that I’d been looking after who got snatched from us by a child trafficker during the chaos of the revolution in Nepal in early 2006. I couldn’t write the book without telling the story of that painful search, the difficulty in tracking them and the euphoria of finding them, one by one, and rescuing them from slavery.

But it’s the other stories that are harder. I had literally hundreds of pages of anecdotes about the children and other events. I knew that some of them would be interesting. But which ones? To me, they were just part of everyday life in the village. When you become so immersed in life, things just don’t strike you as particularly strange until you start talking to somebody who has no experience with that part of the world.

For example, I spent a lot of time talking with the kids in Nepal. I would tell them things that I thought would be interesting – about certain kinds of cars, or about how our houses are made, or historical figures. They thought that was all pretty interesting.

Then one day, I happened to mention the ocean. That really created a stir. In a land-locked country like Nepal, the kids had only seen small lakes. To try to describe a body of water that reached farther than the eye could see and was as deep as the mountains – well, that really blew their minds.

In the same vein, I tried to find stories about the kids that told a bigger story, the ones that were representative of life in Nepal. Like the day I bought them toy cars. They ended up demolishing every one of them almost immediately, then went back to making their own toys out of discarded items. That way, when their makeshift toys broke, they actually knew how to fix them.

Each story we tell should hint at a larger story, a deeper story. The action of a character – real or fictional – should tell you something about that person, how they would respond in other situations. I tried to describe Nepal, its people and its issues, in such a way that the reader would be surprised, yes, but also in such a way that we would see ourselves in these people.

That was the reason for writing the book in the first place. Children on the other side of the world are just like our children. They are just growing up in a radically different environment. If the reader can relate to them, then I’ve told the right stories.